7 ms·

Comparing static website hosts (2022)

93 points by mobilio 4y ago

calltrak 4y ago
[dead]
rurban 4y ago
I don't known why he didn't investigate previous benchmarks for static site hosting. Github Pages was always the best option, by far. Fastest and free.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I’m also a bit surprised at “build times” as I would naïvely expect to build on my laptop and Rsync the result somewhere.
- blakesterz 4y ago
  I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote: GitHub Pages was top of the pops in terms of performance, but since doing this research, I learned that they don’t support Jekyll version 4, which is what I run on this site. So if I were to host with GH Pages, I’d need to use GitHub Actions for my build process.
  - miroljub 4y ago
    > I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote: It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation. I fail to understand why he needs to use any code generator on GitHub. What's wrong with generating all static assets offline and just pushing to GitHub? I've been doing it for years. Complaining that GitHub doesn't compile your source and generate your site is like complaining that the Play Store or App Store don't allow you to push your source code there, and then they do the build for you.
    - blowski 4y ago
      > It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation. Feel free to write your own analysis that _does_ includ GitHub pages, and submit here as well. I'll upvote it.
blakesterz 4y ago
This was interesting to read. I recently changed from Drupal to WordPress and now I'm thinking something more static would be better. Good to know all my options.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You can use Wordpress as a static site generator with some plugins. Basically run Wordpress on a local copy and flatten it out to static files for upload.
  - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
    This is interesting. Can you link to tools that do this “flattening”?
    - szundi 4y ago
      Can one use wget -m for this? Or is there more to it?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Simply static is the one I've used, but wget can work, it's not optimized and may break in some edge cases.
    - linkjuice4all 4y ago
      Not OP but used SimplyStatic[0] to export flattened pages and assets. It’s still its own deploy process but you avoid a lot of security and site speed issues. You can specify root domain and allow/deny which URLs get exported. [0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
      - derekperkins 4y ago
        The activation process uses freemius, which is a joke. I've been trying to activate for 2 weeks and still haven't been able to get it working, and their support is a joke. No shade on the plugin itself, just the third party licensing provider. The free Simply Static has worked great.
kevincox 4y ago
I must be an oddball because these services never really made sense to me. I don't want to use their CI. I already have CI for running tests and other validations. I don't want to have a separate single-threaded CI stack with bare minimum features for building the site. These all have "atomic" deploys which cause problems with hash-named assets as you get 404s during the transition. What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN. I've ended up with S3+CloudFront but it doesn't have all of the nice features you may want from a static site host like index pages, but that is pretty easy to work around.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Same. I don't want to have to reimplement all my CI logic if I change hosting providers. I'm surprised so many vendors assume the opposite. When I surveyed static hosting providers about a year ago, the only ones I found that didn't insist on taking over your CI pipeline were Netlify[0] and Firebase. I assume it's possible on Cloudflare and AWS, too, but I wanted to go with a provider where static hosting is core to their business. I've been happy with Netlify, but given how deeply they bury their "manual deploy" feature, I fear the day that they decide to force everyone into the Netlify-native build workflow. [0] https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys
  - sfmike 4y ago
    might sound crazy but I still love drag and drop a whole Dir into netlify still, its a beautiful method using a computer mouse and it works quite well and takes seconds.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Reminds me of what I used to do 25 years ago with FTP :)
      - szundi 4y ago
        ... into Windows Commander :)
mro_name 4y ago
a box in your closet or bare metal in the datacenter, repectively? While you read the TOS end-to-end (you do that, right?), I finish the site and have lunch.
- blowski 4y ago
  If that works for you, then great. But others do have different requirements to you, and thus it's useful to see someone compare different solutions.
- hermannj314 4y ago
  And when you are doing maintenance on your closet, I will confirm my site is still running fine and eat my lunch.
  - mro_name 4y ago
    what maintenance do you think of that brings downtime? Right, openssl, systemd, udev & the like. There are some, but really less than the TOS. What bothers me, isn't that this isn't for anyone. But that it's missing in comparisons. That's pretending doing overviews but wearing blinders. Deplorable.
cagenut 4y ago
fwiw, the reason github pages is the fastest is because they're cached by fastly. you can cut out the middle man and put your static site directly on their edgecompute platform now (up to 50MB): https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the-edge https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the...
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  Is this actually practical for a personal blog? I can't find a thing on their pricing page listing an exception to their minimum of $50/month for bandwidth. Blog posts of this size would have to be millions of page views a month to even make the minimum.
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Cool! Thanks for the link! This looks like maybe the most appealing option to me. EDIT: ... from a technical / DX / ergonomics perspective, that is. Pricing? Not so much.
- fyzix 4y ago
  Last time I checked, Fastly charges a minimum of $50 so it's not viable when all the other hosts has a free tier and completely free (github and cloudflare).
  - JustFinishedBSG 4y ago
    I personally use BunnyCDN as a poor man Fastly. It's pretty good.
may 4y ago
NearlyFreeSpeech.Net is always my goto.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Me too. Nothing beats them for being straightforward and cost-effective.
- tomxor 4y ago
  ^ they are excellent. The philosophy, the principles, for which they are entirely unique among all providers. It's also entirely sustainable for many long term personal projects, you really can stick a tenner on your account and potentially forget it for years provided your site isn't stupid size (Although I only recently noticed at some point they stopped charging for per unit bandwidth). They've been around for a long time, and I hope they continue to be around for a lot longer. There is also something soothing about the no BS unchanging interface, not a single stock image in sight :)
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  I'm slowly moving off of NearlyFreeSpeech, but mostly because I'm going to my own self-hosting from a homelab (with what reliability downsides that will have), and I'm trying to retire my personal cloud bill. For what it's worth, NFSN is the most excellent website host I've ever used, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone (technically adept) looking to spin up their own lightweight sites.
- kej 4y ago
  I wish more services would use the prepay model that NFSN uses. For personal projects and even some minor business uses, I'd much rather have a site go down than be hit with a surprise bill because I misconfigured something.
sandinmyjoints 4y ago
surge.sh continues to work well for me. Dead simple, free or cheap, have used it for many projects.
- qolop 4y ago
  Second this. The simplicity of getting a site up and running with surge.sh is just unmatched.
acedTrex 4y ago
I just have an ec2 i shove stuff onto with a swag container proxy, works well enough tho it doesnt have the bells and whistles other static hosts do
umvi 4y ago
I like github pages because all I have to do is buy a domain and point it at a git repo and I get HTTPS out of the box.
itqwertz 4y ago
In my experience, Amplify as a platform has been a nightmare to work with. It claims fast prototyping and developer convenience but the constant random failed deployments and the flaky CLI drain the momentum you would have with a batteries-included platform. I highly suggest to avoid this platform.
buildbot 4y ago
Azure blob storage works as a static website host too, probably at literally any scale.

93 points by mobilio 4y ago

[dead]

I don't known why he didn't investigate previous benchmarks for static site hosting. Github Pages was always the best option, by far. Fastest and free.

bombcar 4y ago
I’m also a bit surprised at “build times” as I would naïvely expect to build on my laptop and Rsync the result somewhere.
blakesterz 4y ago
I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote: GitHub Pages was top of the pops in terms of performance, but since doing this research, I learned that they don’t support Jekyll version 4, which is what I run on this site. So if I were to host with GH Pages, I’d need to use GitHub Actions for my build process.
- miroljub 4y ago
  > I think he couldn't do GitHub? Down near the end of the article he wrote: It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation. I fail to understand why he needs to use any code generator on GitHub. What's wrong with generating all static assets offline and just pushing to GitHub? I've been doing it for years. Complaining that GitHub doesn't compile your source and generate your site is like complaining that the Play Store or App Store don't allow you to push your source code there, and then they do the build for you.
  - blowski 4y ago
    > It's not that he couldn't, it's more of an arbitrary self-imposed limitation. Feel free to write your own analysis that _does_ includ GitHub pages, and submit here as well. I'll upvote it.

blakesterz 4y ago

This was interesting to read. I recently changed from Drupal to WordPress and now I'm thinking something more static would be better. Good to know all my options.

bombcar 4y ago
You can use Wordpress as a static site generator with some plugins. Basically run Wordpress on a local copy and flatten it out to static files for upload.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  This is interesting. Can you link to tools that do this “flattening”?
  - szundi 4y ago
    Can one use wget -m for this? Or is there more to it?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Simply static is the one I've used, but wget can work, it's not optimized and may break in some edge cases.
  - linkjuice4all 4y ago
    Not OP but used SimplyStatic[0] to export flattened pages and assets. It’s still its own deploy process but you avoid a lot of security and site speed issues. You can specify root domain and allow/deny which URLs get exported. [0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
    - derekperkins 4y ago
      The activation process uses freemius, which is a joke. I've been trying to activate for 2 weeks and still haven't been able to get it working, and their support is a joke. No shade on the plugin itself, just the third party licensing provider. The free Simply Static has worked great.

kevincox 4y ago

I must be an oddball because these services never really made sense to me. I don't want to use their CI. I already have CI for running tests and other validations. I don't want to have a separate single-threaded CI stack with bare minimum features for building the site. These all have "atomic" deploys which cause problems with hash-named assets as you get 404s during the transition. What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN. I've ended up with S3+CloudFront but it doesn't have all of the nice features you may want from a static site host like index pages, but that is pretty easy to work around.

mtlynch 4y ago
Same. I don't want to have to reimplement all my CI logic if I change hosting providers. I'm surprised so many vendors assume the opposite. When I surveyed static hosting providers about a year ago, the only ones I found that didn't insist on taking over your CI pipeline were Netlify[0] and Firebase. I assume it's possible on Cloudflare and AWS, too, but I wanted to go with a provider where static hosting is core to their business. I've been happy with Netlify, but given how deeply they bury their "manual deploy" feature, I fear the day that they decide to force everyone into the Netlify-native build workflow. [0] https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys
- sfmike 4y ago
  might sound crazy but I still love drag and drop a whole Dir into netlify still, its a beautiful method using a computer mouse and it works quite well and takes seconds.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Reminds me of what I used to do 25 years ago with FTP :)
    - szundi 4y ago
      ... into Windows Commander :)

mro_name 4y ago

a box in your closet or bare metal in the datacenter, repectively? While you read the TOS end-to-end (you do that, right?), I finish the site and have lunch.

blowski 4y ago
If that works for you, then great. But others do have different requirements to you, and thus it's useful to see someone compare different solutions.
hermannj314 4y ago
And when you are doing maintenance on your closet, I will confirm my site is still running fine and eat my lunch.
- mro_name 4y ago
  what maintenance do you think of that brings downtime? Right, openssl, systemd, udev & the like. There are some, but really less than the TOS. What bothers me, isn't that this isn't for anyone. But that it's missing in comparisons. That's pretending doing overviews but wearing blinders. Deplorable.

cagenut 4y ago

fwiw, the reason github pages is the fastest is because they're cached by fastly. you can cut out the middle man and put your static site directly on their edgecompute platform now (up to 50MB): https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the-edge https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the...

DoctorOW 4y ago
Is this actually practical for a personal blog? I can't find a thing on their pricing page listing an exception to their minimum of $50/month for bandwidth. Blog posts of this size would have to be millions of page views a month to even make the minimum.
chrisweekly 4y ago
Cool! Thanks for the link! This looks like maybe the most appealing option to me. EDIT: ... from a technical / DX / ergonomics perspective, that is. Pricing? Not so much.
fyzix 4y ago
Last time I checked, Fastly charges a minimum of $50 so it's not viable when all the other hosts has a free tier and completely free (github and cloudflare).
- JustFinishedBSG 4y ago
  I personally use BunnyCDN as a poor man Fastly. It's pretty good.

may 4y ago

NearlyFreeSpeech.Net is always my goto.

TimTheTinker 4y ago
Me too. Nothing beats them for being straightforward and cost-effective.
tomxor 4y ago
^ they are excellent. The philosophy, the principles, for which they are entirely unique among all providers. It's also entirely sustainable for many long term personal projects, you really can stick a tenner on your account and potentially forget it for years provided your site isn't stupid size (Although I only recently noticed at some point they stopped charging for per unit bandwidth). They've been around for a long time, and I hope they continue to be around for a lot longer. There is also something soothing about the no BS unchanging interface, not a single stock image in sight :)
cptcobalt 4y ago
I'm slowly moving off of NearlyFreeSpeech, but mostly because I'm going to my own self-hosting from a homelab (with what reliability downsides that will have), and I'm trying to retire my personal cloud bill. For what it's worth, NFSN is the most excellent website host I've ever used, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone (technically adept) looking to spin up their own lightweight sites.
kej 4y ago
I wish more services would use the prepay model that NFSN uses. For personal projects and even some minor business uses, I'd much rather have a site go down than be hit with a surprise bill because I misconfigured something.

sandinmyjoints 4y ago

surge.sh continues to work well for me. Dead simple, free or cheap, have used it for many projects.

qolop 4y ago
Second this. The simplicity of getting a site up and running with surge.sh is just unmatched.

acedTrex 4y ago

I just have an ec2 i shove stuff onto with a swag container proxy, works well enough tho it doesnt have the bells and whistles other static hosts do

umvi 4y ago

I like github pages because all I have to do is buy a domain and point it at a git repo and I get HTTPS out of the box.

itqwertz 4y ago

In my experience, Amplify as a platform has been a nightmare to work with. It claims fast prototyping and developer convenience but the constant random failed deployments and the flaky CLI drain the momentum you would have with a batteries-included platform. I highly suggest to avoid this platform.

buildbot 4y ago

Azure blob storage works as a static website host too, probably at literally any scale.